Food for Thought: Attack of the pot rack dust bunnies

Okay, I admit I beefed up the bunnyness for this picture. DeGroot demanded I confess so that "People won't think we actually live like that." But there really were some pretty heavy cobwebs up there.

Stein
/ KNKX

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Using stay-at-home time for kitchen cleaning and reorganization.

Nancy Leson thought I might be using all this stay-at-home time to reorder my kitchen. “Are you alphabetizing your spices?”she snarked. I explained that everything in my kitchen is always in place, including the dust bunnies I noticed crouching like gargoyles at the top of my hanging pot rack.

This week we talk about deep cleaning, reorganizing, finally doing those long put-off chores, and how I will use the Earth's revolution to improve the appearance of my cabinet doors.

Nancy's thousand-plus thousand cookbooks have swaybacked her shelves.

Gravity never sleeps.

Credit Nancy Leson / KNKX

My bookshelf population stays pretty stable, but not Nancy's. “Everywhere I go, people are getting rid of their cookbooks” and she snaps them up, sometimes just to give away, sometimes with a good return on investment. A volume of cookie recipes she gifted to a young neighbor is still paying regular caloric dividends on her doorstop.

I've been using online recipes more than cookbooks lately, but Nance still loves paper. Recently she deployed a roast chicken dinner from Thomas Keller's "Bouchon" cookbook. “I felt like I was in a restaurant when really I was just home with my cookbooks and my husband.” Here's the beauty shot.

Check the fancy napkin ring. Ours just say "Acme Manufacturing."

Credit Nancy Leson / KNKX

I had thought I was keeping my kitchen pretty clean. But at this time of year the afternoon sunlight hits my cabinet doors at the perfect angle to reveal the grease, fingerprints and hardened goo invisible during the rest of the day. I know I should just spend a day scrubbing everything down, but for now I'm willing to wait for celestial mechanics to solve the problem.

I did get rid of the pot rack dust bunnies, though I suspect they may have been adding fragments of flavor similar to what my mom's Chesterfield ashes did for her meatloaf.

“There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.” – Quentin Crisp.